Relaxation from politics induced health condition

Politics has its side effects on our bodily, mental, and spiritual health. Of course, for those who get the highest polls, it is exhilarating and there is celebration for days and days to come. For those who get lower polls it may be a different story.

Depending on how tense, free, fair, or mature the political processes are, there are always chances of many types of mental, bodily, and spiritual side effects.

Bodily disordersthat can be offshoots of political seasons include psychosomatic disorders such as hypertension, gastric and duodenal ulcers, hyperactivity, and irrational and bizarre behavior.

Emotional disordersinclude anger, hatred, vengeance, envy, rancor, confusion, aggression, and collective social upheaval. They are all weapons of mass destruction.

Spiritual outcomes of political seasons may include demoniacs, murderers, vandals, arsons, rapists, enemies, and all kinds of malicious beings. Did I hear you say: “God forbid bad ting”? Yeah! God forbid bad thing.

Many of these mental and emotional disorders are associated with crimes such as cheating, lynching, manslaughter, murder, and vandalism and burning of vehicles, homes, and businesses. Innocent people end up losing their blood, body parts, sanity, or possessions- some forever. Yeah! God forbid bad thing again.

Nigeria is a prayerful nation and can lead the world in wisdom. We have seen countries go down in recent years and some seemingly unrecoverable in our lifetime. These days of universal enlightenment, the powerful individual, ideological extremisms, high technology, multipurpose electronic gadgets, information mongering, magic social media, global corruption, and black market for everything dangerous are not the days to begin any type of strife. The capacity of any strife to spiral out of control is much greater than it was in World War I, World War II, and the Biafran War. Nobody can live his or her best life under strife. Strife is never worth it.We can collectively avoid the worse-case-scenario of violence. We should surprise the world that we are a healthy people – body, mind, and spirit.

Each person can be in control of his or her own participation in the after-events of polls by thinking beforehand how to withstand or counteract any perceived insults such as cheating, deprivation of rights, abuse of power, etc; how to deny wrong doing, reject lawlessness, and protest peacefully. We should not leave ourselves to the eruption of dangerous passions but rather should positively calculate effective response towards a peaceful resolution.

Everybody is capable of autogenic relaxation, drawing some calmness from within oneself, from one’s faith, from one’s intellect, from one’s maturity, from one’s common sense, from one’s experience, from one’s perspective of a good life in the future in a world of peace.

Whether we change altogether or we consolidate the good works already done, may this season of politics bring us all a little bit of Patience, a great deal of Goodluck, General peace ahead, so we all remain with some Aisha (liveliness). Politics can always be a win-win event where there is love. Low polls or high polls, the true winners emerge in their greatness when life can continue for all.

Dr. ‘Bola John is a biomedical scientist based in Nigeria and in the USA. For any comments or questions on this column, please email [email protected] or call 08160944635.